The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In computer networks such as the Internet, packets of data are sent from a source to a destination via a network of devices including links (communication paths such as telephone or optical lines) and nodes (for example, routers and switches directing the packet along one or more of a plurality of links connected to it) according to one of various routing protocols.
In some instances, network devices may be misconfigured, fail, experience a hardware fault or software error, or otherwise behave incorrectly resulting in service outages and routing protocol failure. Many failures are a consequence of “aging”, i.e., a system having been up and running without a reboot. Aging causes failures because network devices become unstable over time due to system inconsistencies. The system inconsistencies may be caused by buffer overflows, memory leaks, timing-related concurrency bugs, and system process termination. For example, routers often experience memory hogging that causes processes to be shut down, which in turn lead to system instabilities, degraded router performance, or failure.
Unplanned network device failures require fault management and diagnostic activities to determine and remove the root cause of the failure and repair the network. However, the fault management and diagnostic activities are labor and capital intensive and accordingly, contribute significantly to the cost of operating a network and supporting operational infrastructure.